Polling guru Nate Silver and his election prediction model gave Donald Trump a 63.8% chance of winning the electoral college in an update to his latest election forecast on Sunday, after a NYT-Siena College poll found Donald Trump leading Vice President Kamala Harris by 1 percentage point.
Harris has come out ahead in several national polls and swing state polls since taking over the top of the ticket. However, the results of the new NYT/Siena College poll, according to Silver, show that the results of the poll confirmed his election model's view that there was a "shift in momentum" in the race.
The NYT/Siena college poll also found more voters said Harris is "too liberal or progressive" on key policy issues than voters who said they considered Trump to be "too conservative."
According to his model, Harris has just a 36% chance of winning the electoral college, and overall, leads Trump by 2.5 points in Silver's national polling average.
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"A new New York Times/Siena College poll this morning contained excellent news for Donald Trump, showing him 1 point ahead in a head-to-head matchup against Kamala Harris and 2 points up with minor candidates included. This is one of our highest-rated pollsters, so it has a fair amount of influence on the numbers, reducing Harris’s lead in our national polling average to 2.5 points, which would put her in dangerous territory in the Electoral College," Silver wrote in the update at 11 a.m. on Sunday.
Silver initially wrote on Wednesday that Trump's chances of winning the Electoral College have increased from 52.4% to 58.2% since the end of August. Harris' odds had decreased from 47.3% to 41.6% in that same time frame.
Silver also noted that if Harris performed well in the debate, the NYT poll might not matter.
"The good news for Harris is that there’s a debate on Tuesday, and if she turns in a strong performance, nobody is going to care so much about the Times poll. We’ll have a longer narrative update on the state of the race coming later today," he wrote.
Silver also said on Wednesday that Michigan and Pennsylvania, both key swing states, might prove to be a problem for her.
"In PA, our polling averages had Harris +1.8 pre-DNC, but it's now Harris +1.0. That's before any convention bounce adjustment, which is implemented at a later stage of the model. In MI, the polling average has fallen from Harris +3.1 pre-DNC to Harris +1.9 now," he wrote on X.
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Silver pointed to multiple key portions of the NYT poll in an additional post on Sunday, specifically the fact that 47% of voters see Harris as too liberal.
"I’m not quite sure how Harris is supposed to spin her way out of this perception," Silver wrote, noting that a high percentage of voters said they don't know what Harris stands for in the poll, suggesting there was room to improve on those numbers.
"But Harris also blew one big opportunity to tack to the center with her selection of Tim Walz rather than Josh Shapiro: that a tiny minority of progressives objected to Shapiro was an argument in Shapiro’s favor, if anything. I think Walz was a decent enough pick on his own merits, but given an opportunity to offer a tangible signal of the direction her presidency was headed, she reverted to 2019 mode," Silver wrote.
